excursion trains are full to overflowing. There are
always some who shove and push and get decent seats
and laugh at the others. And the others stand on the
platform and the train goes off and leaves them. That is
how it is with me. But the question is which are the
better people : those who get themselves seats or those
who stand aside ? It is not necessarily always weakness,
I assure you, but it is a sort of pride, or modesty------"

" I know, Firilei," she said, and looked soothingly at
his excited face.

" No, let me go on. I want to tell you something more.
I am now doing gynaecology. Not long ago I examined a
pregnant woman, a girl, who was expecting an illegiti-
mate child, and so receiving free attention—a House
case, as we call it there. There were four and twenty of
us and we examined the girl one after another. She was
lying on the table and she kept her eyes tight shut. When
it was all over, she looked at us one after the other, as
though she were almost demented. I can't stand any-
thing like that. It touched me too deeply—I simply am
no doctor* At the confinement there were only twelve
present, because it happened during the holidays. Just
imagine a girl, such a poor little creature, scarcely twenty,
giving birth to her child with twelve youths looking on.
No—listen to me. They brought a woman into the
lecture room. She looked like a drowned corpse. You
cannot imagine the horror of it—puffed up, inhuman,
blue, her eyes set deep in her face, her hands like balloons.
She could not lie down. She could not breathe. They
could not make her lie down, They brought her up in a
chair. The Geheimrat lectured on, drew attention to this
and that, gave his diagnosis; incompensated stenosis of
the aorta. A few days later she lay in the dissecting room;
the diagnosis had been wrong. The woman had a carci-
noma which had blocked the oesophagus—they showed

75 '